


like silver refined in a furnace of clay

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Chuck as God, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-18
Updated: 2013-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-20 13:44:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/887948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are fifteen drafts of Swan Song saved on Chuck Shurley's computer, and each of them has a different ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like silver refined in a furnace of clay

 

_And the words of the Lord are flawless,_  
_like silver refined in a furnace of clay,_  
_purified seven times._  
_Psalm 12:6_

  
  
He hadn't written in a long time, before this. Created, yeah. Destroyed, even. But not written.  
  
It's been two thousand years since he's written, actually, and even with that this is the first time he's done so _physically_. He has breathed words and dropped images into the minds of apostles and prophets before, but never has he picked up the pen himself, shaped the forms of letters with ink, bled thought and meaning onto a blank white page.  
  
Not, you know, that he's done a whole lot of writing with a pen this time around. A computer's a lot faster.  
  
In his last human incarnation, he was far more concerned with speaking that writing. You could reach more people that way, then. He'd spent years honing the art of speaking, fascinated by the way that words could be knit together and made to linger in the air, powerful even when spoken by a human voice instead of a divine one. He grew up surrounded by dust and heat, brothers and sisters and noise and work, and he remembers escaping from the whirl of activity to wander out in the grass outside his village, to speak to everything and nothing, to feel the wonder of the dirt between his toes, warm and soft and full of life.  
  
In this lifetime he grew up without heat, without dust, without crowding and without dirt under his bare feet. He grew up the only child of a single mother in Minnesota, became accustomed to cold and quiet and to walking on chilly linoleum more often than warm earth. He remembers spending winters in a dark basement with a notebook and a ballpoint pen and his mother's collection of paperbacks, which was a hodgepodge assortment of classics like _The Odyssey_ and _The Sound and the Fury_ mixed in with old hard-boiled detective stories and romance novels. He remembers sitting on the quarter-inch of carpet laid over the concrete basement floor, chewing the cap of a pen between his teeth and trying to imitate the cadence of the words with the chickenscratch in his notebook.  
  
He remembers wondering why that was so _difficult_.  
  
He's not sure he'll do it like this again. Writing is _hard,_ and it's nothing like speaking. Words don't fit together on a page the way they hang together in the air, and even after thirty years of practice he's still not that great at it. He, who has spoken souls, dynasties, galaxies into being, who spent a whole human lifetime speaking and doing his best to teach – he who has done this finds writing difficult.  
  
Not that it's kept him from writing. So maybe he's not the best writer ever. He's made peace with that. It's not the point. The point is that his stories are _true_. That's what he's always prided himself on anyways. He writes not because he has to, but because he _wants_ to – because this is a story that should be told, recorded, remembered, even if only by a few.  
  
Tonight – a warm night in May, pleasantly mild and altogether inoffensive – the world could have ended. It didn't, but it could have. There are fifteen drafts of the book he's titled _Swan Song_ saved on his computer, in the folder marked "Supernatural", and all of them end differently. Dean dies. Sam dies. They both die. The world ends. It doesn't.  
  
He knows, of course, how the story ends. He has always had an inkling of how it would end, but it didn't _have_ to end that way – there are so many ways this story could have played out, and he's written down a lot of them. That is the most important, the most fascinating part of this whole thing – it is the reason that grinding out the pages has given him fits, has made this human body shake with the trauma of watching a story that is played out on the head of a pin, shaken by the smallest decision, the shortest word or the quietest glance cast across a room.  
  
Sometimes it's almost enough to make him re-think that whole "free will" thing. Almost, but not quite.  
  
Tonight he finished the story he's been writing for years, and he's alone in his house now, hovering in this short, suspended moment between one thing and the next.  
  
He stares at the glass of amber liquid in his hand, at the reflected light streaking through the glass. The wood of the desk and the cracking surface of the plastic chair underneath him are solid and cold, firm and physical, and he thinks he'll probably miss that. He missed Earth the last time he left it.  
  
He downs the glass of whiskey, savors the burn in the back of his throat, anticipates missing that too.  
  
Technically, the story isn't actually finished – nothing ever really ends – but the writing is.  
  
His chair is empty.


End file.
